Astronomy and Dream Visions in Late Medieval Iceland: Stjörnu-Odda draumr and the Emergence of Norse Legendary Fiction

Abstract

The massive corpus of dream visions surviving from medieval Iceland testifies to a powerful fascination with dreams and with the challenge of interpreting them. Perhaps the most challenging of all is the independent prose tale or þattr known as Stjornu-Odda draumr, “Star-Oddi’s Dream,” set in twelfth-century Iceland and probably composed in its extant form some two centuries later. This miniature saga is unusual for many reasons, not least of which is the fact that its dream vision is an embedded fornaldarsaga. Stjornu-Odda draumr is not one of the better-known Icelandic sagas, but those scholars who have studied it acknowledge that it is a literary tour de force and altogether unique in the saga corpus. For this reason alone, it deserves a more extended literary analysis than has hitherto been given. Its wider importance lies in the light it sheds on a vexed question in Icelandic literary history, namely, the emergence of fictionality in the sagas. In the first section of this article, I analyze the text’s narrative structure and its authorial self-consciousness. In the remaining sections, I discuss its possible meanings for a contemporary audience by considering the relationship between dream and frame tale within wider literary and historical contexts: the corpus of medieval Icelandic prose dream visions (section 2), information about the tale’s protagonist and his astronomical activities preserved in other texts (section 3), and the experimental, self-consciously fictional dream visions produced elsewhere in Europe at this time (section 4). Stjornu-Odda draumr is usually seen as having been written in a long tradition of legendary fiction;2 I will suggest on the contrary that, while its use of legendary narrative topoi is undeniable, it may represent the earliest